Dropbox marks 25 million storing data in cloud

INTERNET 25 million use Dropbox to synchronize in the cloud

Casey Newton, Chronicle Staff Writer

Published 4:00 am, Monday, April 18, 2011

Photo: Russell Yip, The Chronicle

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Arash Ferdowsi, left, and Drew Houston, seen on Thursday, April 14, 2011 in San Francisco, Calif., are the founders of Dropbox.
Ran on: 04-19-2011
Arash Ferdowsi (left) and Drew Houston are the founders of San Francisco's Dropbox. less

Arash Ferdowsi, left, and Drew Houston, seen on Thursday, April 14, 2011 in San Francisco, Calif., are the founders of Dropbox.
Ran on: 04-19-2011
Arash Ferdowsi (left) and Drew Houston are the founders of San ... more

Photo: Russell Yip, The Chronicle

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Dropbox marks 25 million storing data in cloud

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As a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Drew Houston grew tired of transporting files around campus on a thumb drive.

Thumb drives are easily lost or forgotten. Houston was determined to find an easier, more efficient way to manage his stuff.

The solution Houston devised in 2007 was Dropbox, a service that lets users access their photos, documents and other files from almost any device connected to the Internet. Little did he know that a profusion of mobile devices would soon lead to data being scattered across a cornucopia of devices - and a growing market opportunity for a company that could bring them together.

Now Dropbox, the service Houston launched along with fellow student and co-founder Arash Ferdowsi, is connecting devices for a huge and growing base of users. On Monday, the San Francisco startup announced that it serves 25 million users, up from 4 million in February 2010.

The company's rapid growth highlights the growing nature of the syncing problem. Dropbox, which offers both free and paid services, lets users link Internet-connected devices with a minimum of effort.

"What we're about is simplifying millions of people's lives by allowing them for the first time to have all your stuff in front of you, wherever you are, on any device," Houston said. "As this world gets more complicated, there are billions of devices and apps and services that all don't talk to each other - Dropbox is really the fabric that ties all these things together."

To be sure, Dropbox is not alone in offering cloud-based synchronization services. Amazon recently began giving 5 gigabytes of online storage free to every customer, and Apple is said to be considering new cloud-based services of its own. Houston's original business proposal mentions Google and a variety of online backup services as potential competitors.

Keeping it simple

Dropbox's response has been to focus on making the service easier to use than its rivals, and to increase the number of ways customers can use it.

The founders say the next 12 months will see new electronics coming to market that integrate with Dropbox's service - and bear the company's logo on the box. While no agreements are in place yet, devices that could see Dropbox integration include printers, scanners, cameras and televisions.

Houston and Ferdowsi attribute Dropbox's rapid growth in large part to its simplicity. Users download a free program for Windows, Mac or Linux - or for their Android or iOS devices - and then put whatever files they like into it. Dropbox stores up to 2 gigabytes of data for free, and charges up to $19.99 a month for 100 gigabytes of storage.

Wherever users go, their files can be accessed securely from the cloud, either from a Dropbox client or from the Web. It's an easy way to move files between home and work, or from a dorm room to a computer lab. And the software is essentially foolproof.

As Houston likes to say: If you can save a file, you can use Dropbox.

As a result, the company's users include just about everyone who uses computers. College students, astronomers, a pastor, a filmmaker and the offensive coordinator for an NFL team are among the users who have written Dropbox unsolicited thank-you notes after the service helped them accomplish their tasks.

Working with others

About half of Dropbox's customers use the service to collaborate, said Ferdowsi, the company's chief technical officer.

"What Dropbox gives you that a lot of other solutions don't is that you can continue using all the other applications you already use," he said. "The only thing you have to change is where you're saving the files to."

Dropbox's growth in users has also meant an accompanying rise in revenues - something Houston and Ferdowsi declined to discuss in any detail. But one sign of Dropbox's success is the comparatively small amount of venture capital they've had to raise so far - one $7.2 million round in 2008. (Evernote, another high-profile cloud-syncing company that uses the "freemium" business model, has raised $45.5 million with a reported user base of 6 million.)

Dropbox's announcements Monday could make it a larger acquisition target. But Houston says he has found his calling.

"If we can make someone's life 1 percent better, or save them an hour of time - (multiplied by) a billion people - there's nothing else you can do and have that level of impact," he said.

The founders acknowledge they may need to raise more capital to help the company grow internationally. Already, about half of Dropbox users come from outside the United States, with paying users in 175 countries.

To date, the service has been available only in English. After Monday, users can access Dropbox in Spanish, German, French and Japanese.

In the meantime, Houston and Ferdowsi don't worry that they'll run out of file-sharing headaches to solve. If the old problem was moving files between home and work, the new one will involve moving files between cameras, televisions, printers and even automobiles.

"As long as people have problems with computers and technology, we're not done," Houston said. "We have a lot of work ahead of us."

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